The mention of Tasmania summons the comic recollections of the Tasmanian devil–the voracious marsupial that was popularized in American cartoons. But there is a much more harsh reality for Tasmania. Tasmania is an island state in Australia. It is located in the south of the Australian mainland, separated by the Bass Strait. The state encompasses the main island of Tasmania, the 26th-largest island in the world, and the surrounding other 334 islands. The aboriginal inhabitants of the island were Black People who might have gone there by crossing an ancient land bridge that connected Tasmania to the continent of Australia.
The first people of Tasmania, known as Palawa, have tightly curled hair, with skin complexions ranging from black to reddish-brown. They have broad noses, wide mouths, and brown eyes. They were short in stature with little body fat. There were over 6,000 Tasmanians. They had lived in Tasmania for more than 35,000 years. They were hunter-gatherers, each band with its lands which they hunted and maintained with controlled burnings. Over time, the gradual rising of the sea level submerged the Tasmanian land bridge, and the Black aborigines of Tasmania experienced more than 10,000 years of solitude and physical isolation from the rest of the world.
The Tasmanian Genocide
The isolation of Tasmania’s original people ended in 1642 with the arrival and intrusion of the first White Europeans. Abel Jansen Tasman, the Dutch navigator after whom the island is named, anchored off the Tasmanian coast in early December 1642. Tasman named the island Van Diemen’s land after Anthony Van Diemen–the governor-general of the Dutch East India Company. The island continued to be called Van Diemen’s Land until 1855.
The Whites from Britain wiped out nearly all the people of Tasmania, who are now part of Australia. They sent the few hundred that remained to prison camps, where they died of disease and despair.
Despite killings, there was an uneasy peace. Whites lived along the coast. Most of the best hunting lands were still in Tasmanian hands.
Then in 1817, when Whites discovered that Tasmanian lands were vast for raising their sheep, the British government forcibly took, without treaty or payment, vast amounts of Tasmanian land.
From about 1823, Tasmanians grew increasingly violent and fought for their lands from the white invaders. In 1826, the then British governor, George Arthur, declared them “open enemies” beyond the protection of the law for nothing. It was an open season on killing Tasmanians, what some call the War of Extermination.
The whites decided to get revenge for past killings and killed 70 Tasmanians for one white dead.
Even the British newspaper presented the news with a bizarre title; they were “shot like so many crows.”
In 1829, with only a few hundred Tasmanians left, the then governor suffered a sudden fit of conscience. He made a “conciliation and protection” policy – meaning capture and imprisonment.
They rounded up the remaining Tasmanians and sent them to prison camps, which featured:
- vermin,
- high-salt diets,
- poor water supply,
- separation of children from parents,
- re-education in Christian civilization,
- white respiratory diseases.
At one of the camps, two-thirds were dead within the year. And there are other camps where Whites (Pink People) urinated on them.
By 1830, the government set up the Aborigines Committee to understand why Tasmanians were so hostile. They mainly blamed Tasmanian treachery and savagery – but not its robbery of their land.
By the 1850s, the genocide was already written off as “natural” and “inevitable,” which the late 1800s would see as Darwinian fate. The Good Christians did not like being called animals (even when they were animals) by Darwin – but were not above using his ideas when they acted like animals.
In the late 1800s, when mixed-race Tasmanians, the children of those stolen Tasmanian women and girls, asked for their land back, the government sent them to Cape Barren Island, where they lived until 1951, beyond the reach of the law. From the 1920s to the 1970s, the government took their children from them to teach them the filthy White ways.
Since the 1990s, some land has been given back, and apologies made instead of all their properties.
